How Hockenheim summed up Hamilton vs Rosberg

This was the 2016 season in microcosm. More than that, the German Grand Prix weekend was the last two-and-a-half years of Formula 1 racing and the story of a personal rivalry rolled into just three days.

Nico Rosberg was so close to winning his home grand prix. That might seem an absurd suggestion given he finished fourth, but just as with the world championship in the previous two years, and with the way this season's title looks to be going, the margins between glory and disaster were tiny.

And, as has become usual again in the last three months, Lewis Hamilton danced that fine line to perfection to take a 19-point lead into the August break while Rosberg slipped the wrong side of it.

Through practice, Rosberg looked the stronger on single-lap and race pace. After the twin scares in qualifying of a resurgent Hamilton and an aborted first Q3 run, Rosberg withstood the pressure brilliantly to nail a pole position lap.

From there, he knew he probably just needed to get away in the lead, to make it the 310 metres to Turn 1 ahead, to damn-near guarantee victory and a reclaimed championship lead. Perhaps knowing he was so close, that he only needed not to fluff the start, played a part in him dropping to fourth off the line behind Hamilton and the Red Bulls of Max Verstappen and Daniel Ricciardo?

Or perhaps it was the fact that the Mercedes is a tricky beast to get off the line for both drivers? Either way, the tables were turned and while Hamilton had, barring disaster, won the race in the first few seconds, Rosberg's afternoon had started to unravel in a most revealing way.

"Too much engagement on the clutch," was Rosberg's explanation. "That's a bad start. It took me by surprise, I didn't expect that at all, especially after the formation lap where it felt good."

The upshot was an initial launch that wasn't too bad, but wheelspin in the second phase of the getaway, particularly in third gear. Rosberg spent the first part of the lap with half of his attention on trying to get back past the Red Bulls and the other half focused on keeping the two Ferraris behind.

He ran fourth, separated from his great rival by two Red Bulls and 3.237 seconds at the end of the first lap. Barring technical misfortune or misadventure, it was game over, with Hamilton controlling the race beautifully.

Rosberg soon switched to 'Plan B', which meant nothing more grandiose than he stayed on super-softs when he pitted for the first time at the end of lap 11 of the 67, while Hamilton took softs. But even with that move, something happened that encapsulated the Mercedes tendency to make life more difficult for itself - Rosberg was stopped for 3.5 seconds. At the absolute maximum, that was only 1.5s lost, but it meant any chance of undercutting Ricciardo, who pitted a lap later, was gone.

At this point, the stress level probably wasn't too high. Likely, Rosberg had already disabused himself of any notions of defeating Hamilton and turned his attention to damage limitation, which meant second place.

Even with Ricciardo now on softs and Rosberg on super-softs, the gap did not come down dramatically. At the end of lap 13, it was 3.221s, but Rosberg did not close to around a second behind until he nailed it ahead of his second pitstop on lap 27. It was a conservative stint from Rosberg, and not unreasonably so. Besides, the initial target at this stage was Verstappen, who was second but on super-softs and stopped a lap after Rosberg, while Ricciardo eventually went six laps longer.

That undercut did work, or so it seemed. Verstappen emerged from the pits with Rosberg bearing down on him. At the Turn 6 hairpin, he left the inside undefended and Rosberg took the invitation. With Verstappen drifting towards the inside under braking, a habit that is not illegal but that has incurred plenty of criticism from rivals, Rosberg steamed up the inside and made the pass for de facto third place.

At the time, Rosberg was "ecstatic" at the "awesome" move after coming from so far back. But he went so deep into the corner that Verstappen could not turn in and was forced off the track. The result was that the stewards, including two-time world champion Emerson Fittipaldi, hit him with a five-second penalty. Rosberg felt it was harsh, but you can't argue with the fact that Verstappen had no choice but to go off the track or allow Rosberg to hit him.

Put to him that it had echoes of the failed attempt to stop Hamilton taking the lead on the last lap in Austria, Rosberg railed.

"It's not comparable," he said. "It was different positioning. I was clearly ahead this time. I certainly didn't expect a penalty."

But in what it said about Rosberg, it was comparable. It said, once again, that Rosberg simply does not have a great feel for passing people on the brakes and when he forces himself to attempt to do so, he often overdoes it. Once into the corner, he stayed straight for too long, going so deep into the turn that Verstappen simply could not turn in. It just wasn't well-judged.

As for fine margins, this penalty proved to be the difference between a comfortable second and a desultory fourth. Rosberg had Verstappen behind, and knew he would jump Ricciardo when the Australian finally made his second stop in a few laps. But not with the penalty, which put him back behind both Red Bulls.

This is where things started to unravel even more. The bottom line is that, when he needed it, Rosberg simply could not find the pace needed to salvage the situation.

"You just need to pull that gap, and it's yours," he was told over the radio. A few laps later, the message was more urgent, telling Rosberg he needed to be lapping in the mid-1m19s bracket to make it work. It, of course, being pitting, taking the penalty and then, once the Red Bull stops had shaken out, holding second.

The reality was that Rosberg was unable to get into the 19s. Only once during that 17-lap third stint did he dip under the 1m20s barrier, and then only by a tenth. The best he generally did was low 1m20s. Yes, the tyres weren't giving him the grip he wanted, but it's safe to say that the speed just wasn't quite there.

With the easy way out of the window, it was time to go the hard way. But first, Mercedes intervened with another error that, frankly, was ridiculous. Rosberg dived into the pits at the end of lap 44, before either Red Bull made their final stop, to serve his penalty.

The five seconds have to be served at the beginning of the stop, so Rosberg pulled into his box and the mechanics dutifully avoided touching the car. Five seconds passed, slowly. Then six. Then seven and finally eight before the crew even thought about bolting on Rosberg's final set of soft Pirellis. In total, Rosberg was parked up for 12.5 seconds for a stop that should have taken eight maximum.

"Even in a Formula 1 team with all of the high tech, if you get instruments you don't usually use like a stopwatch, they can fail," said team boss Toto Wolff. "The stopwatch didn't start properly and once we realised, we had to take it safe and that's why it took longer than normal."

Wolff insisted that this was equipment failure rather than operator failure, but the upshot was more wasted time. So when soft-shod Verstappen, who had by then let the faster Ricciardo, on super-softs, through to take second, pitted a lap later he was able to stay ahead comfortably. With a correctly-executed pitstop, it would have been a lot closer, possibly close enough for Rosberg to have another go at a pass.

As it was, the penalty left Rosberg in fourth place, five seconds behind Verstappen and six behind Ricciardo. But with plenty of laps left, the chase was on. Rosberg had...nothing. There was a little more juice in the engine to deploy should he have the pace to make a fight of it, but he simply could not close the gap to Verstappen.

Yes, Red Bull's pace at Hockenheim was good, but Rosberg should have had more to give.

Hamilton, by comparison, on the softs in the final stint did have the pace, when he needed it, to pull time on the Red Bulls and he was cruising and saving his engine. There was more pace in the car, but Rosberg couldn't find it. And that was that. Game over. A 13-point swing to Hamilton in the championship fight.

"They're quick, so it's difficult to get them," said Rosberg of the Red Bulls. He then refused to blame the timing blunder in the stop for his failure to do better than fourth.

"It's not that frustrating because there were so many things that went wrong, it was just that one small thing which actually didn't make a difference in the end because I wouldn't have been able to get the Red Bulls anyway because they were on the super-softs and they lasted pretty well in that last stint."

Perhaps true, but it was just one of a confluence of factors preventing Rosberg from coming away from Hockenheim either with a win, or the 'save' that a second place would have represented. Without the bad start, without the Verstappen pass that was misjudged, without the penalty blunder, without the slow first Mercedes pitstop, Rosberg would at least have made a better fist of it.

Some of those factors were down to him, some of them weren't, but the bottom line is that once the race started to unravel, he simply could not gather it together again. Perhaps that is the true difference between Hamilton and Rosberg. One can usually claw his way back when things go wrong, the other doesn't always.

Rosberg knows that he has to be at his best to beat Hamilton. Not only that, but he probably realises that he needs his team-mate to be slightly below par even for that to work. Hockenheim was just that opportunity, for while Hamilton drove very well to control the race completely after taking the lead and might have had pole, this was by his lofty standards a good, rather than fantastic, weekend.

"I didn't make any mistakes, so in my heart I'm happy with what I did today," said Hamilton. "I came to do a job. Yesterday wasn't perfect but you learn from those things and today was a real show of looking at the glass half full and filling it up."

Hamilton has a knack of winning even when not quite at his best, although he hasn't had to too often this season given his mighty pace even when car problems were robbing him of results early in the season. Rosberg, by contrast, finds it a little harder.

Deep down, he probably knows that, no matter what he pulls out of the bag, Hamilton just has a slightly bigger bag with a few more tricks in it.

"I'm very disappointed because I had an awesome qualifying yesterday and I was feeling good, had good race [pace] on Friday so I was really optimistic and thinking I could bring it home today. So I'm very disappointed that everything went wrong."

Perhaps you could say the same about the past few years for Rosberg - a very fine driver, but perhaps not quite with the edge of a champion. A story Hamilton told after the race revealed a little of the difference between the two.

Hamilton spoke of facing a superior, older boxer while around 8-10 years old. After a battering in the first round, he came back for the second and held his own. That story seems to encapsulate his fighting spirit.

You wonder if, for all his efforts, Rosberg doesn't quite have that same reserve to draw on.

In the second part of the season, he will have to show he can get back into the ring and start landing more of the punches he makes the opportunity to have.